Priest Murdered Schoolteacher During Confession — Catholic Church Protected Him for 57 Years

On April 16th, 1960, 25-year-old Irene Garza went to Sacred Heart Catholic Church in McAllen, Texas, for confession on Holy Saturday. The beloved second-grade teacher trusted 27-year-old Father John Feit to hear her sins and guide her spiritually. Instead, he attacked her, beat her, sexually assaulted her, and stuffed a cloth down her throat to silence her. Then he returned upstairs to celebrate Easter Mass while she lay dying in the church basement.

Father Feit moved Irene's body to a bathtub at a nearby pastoral house. According to testimony from a monk who later came forward, Irene regained consciousness briefly and whispered her final words: "I can't breathe. I can't breathe." Father Feit left her there and went back to church. Five days later, her body was found floating in a canal, her face beaten beyond recognition.

Police immediately suspected Father Feit. He had scratches on his hands, changed his story multiple times, and just three weeks earlier had attacked another young woman at a different church. But the Catholic Church intervened, protecting their priest, transferring him out of state, and pressuring prosecutors to drop the investigation. The district attorney, a devout Catholic, refused to authorize an arrest warrant for murder.

For 57 years, Father John Feit walked free. He left the priesthood, married, raised three children, and lived a normal middle-class life while Irene's family fought desperately for justice. The case went cold, buried by institutional power and church coverup.

But Irene's cousin, Noemi Garza Siegler, refused to give up. For nearly six decades, she wrote letters, made phone calls, tracked down witnesses, and kept pressure on law enforcement. In 2002, the Texas Rangers reopened the case. That's when Dale Tachiny, a former monk, came forward with explosive testimony: in 1963, Father Feit had confessed the murder to him during counseling sessions at a monastery, providing details that matched the evidence perfectly. Church officials had ordered Tachiny to remain silent.

On February 10th, 2016—nearly 56 years after Irene's murder—Father John Feit was arrested at age 83 in Scottsdale, Arizona. At his 2017 trial, the jury took just 7 hours to convict him. He was sentenced to life in prison. Ten weeks later, Father Feit died behind bars at age 85, finally paying for a crime he'd gotten away with for more than half a century.

The Irene Garza case exposed how the Catholic Church systematically protected predator priests, choosing institutional reputation over justice for victims—a pattern that would later emerge in countless abuse scandals worldwide.